PENNY SIOPIS `THE BABY AND THE BATHWATER- MOTIF, MEDIUM AND MEANING IN THE WORK OF PENNY SIOPIS`

PENNY SIOPIS `THE BABY AND THE BATHWATER- MOTIF, MEDIUM AND MEANING IN THE WORK OF PENNY SIOPIS`

Elizabeth Rankin, softcover, colour reproductions, 21 cms  x 30 cms, condition: as new.

This booklet was published to coinside  with the first artists-in-residence programme at the National Arts festival in Grahamstown (Makhanda). 

Penny Siopis works across painting, installation and film, bringing together diverse references and materials in ways that disturb disciplinary boundaries and binaries. Concepts of time run through all her work often manifesting in the actual physical changes of her materials; in her early cake paintings oil paint is made to be unnaturally affected by gravity, age and decay; in her films using archival footage time is marked as much by the effects of age on the celluloid as by the historical period caught in the sweep of the camera; in her accumulations of found objects in her installations, ideas of the heirloom come to the fore with her ongoing conceptual work Will (1997 )  in which she bequeaths objects to beneficiaries being the ultimate time piece only becoming complete on her death; her glue and ink paintings index flux as they record the material transformation that happens when viscous glue matter reacts with pigment, gravity, the artist's bodily gestures, and the drying effects of the air.

The writer, Elizabeth Rankin, was awarded the first doctoral degree in Art History at WITS, her thesis being a study of the development of knowledge and taste in the rediscovery of Greece, entitled "Englishmen on the Acropolis: an historiography of the Parthenon, c. 1750-1850".

She was subsequently appointed to the Chair of the History of Art at the University of the Witwatersrand.